The Ball of Wisdom

The gymnasium was a great, dark lung, inhaling the chirping songs of the children in the daytime and exhaling the silence of solitude at night. Behzat had come here for the clarity of the projectile motion, the clean arc of a free throw, the immutable satisfaction of a ball passing through a net, and solving some skirmishes in his life, if not all. Instead, he found this velvety obscurity hanging in the air. The janitor, a sullen and elusive man named Ercüment, was unreachable; his little basement office, behind the furnace room, was locked, and the phone rang into a void that seemed to swallow the sound whole.

He should have left, so he did the right thing once and all. The quarrel with Esra spread on his skin like a fine, irritating dust. Her voice, tight with a practical despair he could never emulate: “The tuition, Behzat. It’s due tomorrow. My father has offered. It’s simple.” And his own, choked with a principle that felt, even to him, like a kind of absolute misery: “We are not taking a loan from your father. Never did in the past, not now, and not in the future… The bank will call about the credit application next week. Can we not just wait?” But waiting, to Esra, was a luxury she could not afford. The child must be paid for. She grinned as if she knew a lot more than Behzat did, the past transactions, hidden accounts…

Dark? Yes, Esra's eyes were even darker when she fiercely fought. This is why he did not leave the equally dark gym. He needed a distraction, something to keep his mind occupied. He had the ball, a familiar orange planet in his hands, like a wobbly jellyfish filling his sweaty palms. A high, triangle-shaped window and the full moon provided the only light, a weak, ecclesiastical silver that pooled on the hardwood floor, making of the court a ghost of a court, the free-throw line a faint chalky smudge, the backboard a darker slab of darkness. The hoop was an invisible idea, a circular absence he had to believe in, a Platonic rationalism. If not the perfect circle, this was the resemblance of that idealized circle, the one that lives in the world of ideas, same as the way he was the resemblance of a perfect marriage, a perfect husband, a perfect father… Until tonight.

The first shot was a betrayal. It left his fingers with the memory of a thousand practiced motions, but sailed wide, a clumsy satellite missing its orbit entirely, thudding dully against the padded wall. The sound was obscene in the quiet. And the miss conjured another failure: their wedding day. A borrowed car from her brother, a sleek, mocking thing that smelled of someone else’s cigars. A petty, hot argument over a scratch on the door, a scratch that was there before, or was it? The memory was a poorly developed photograph. He saw the guests later, leaving the dance hall, like the red lanterns carried away into the summer night, winking out one by one like dying stars, leaving him and Esra alone in a sudden, terrifying expanse of matrimony.

He retrieved the ball. The second shot was a thought made leather. As he released it, the image came unbidden: his uncle’s grave. A plain, grey stone in a town he had not visited in fifteen years. He had sent money to his grandfather for it, a guilt-offering mailed in a plain envelope. The uncle had lived alone, died alone, a man of extremist political affiliations whom the family discussed in hushed, dismissive tones. Behzat had wanted to visit him, once, but the pressure of their collective judgment—Why would you? He's troubled, Behzat. It's none of your business—had held him fast, an insect pinned in amber. The ball, this time, whispered against the rim. A tremor. A nearness. It did not go in, but the universe had acknowledged his aim.

The third shot was a ritual. He bounced the ball, once, twice, syncing its rhythm to the drum in his chest. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. In the dark, he felt acutely alive, a heartbeat propelling a sphere toward an unseen truth. He was describing an elephant in a dark room, each touch, each shot, a revelation of a part—a leg, a trunk, the curve of a tusk. He was getting closer. The ball left his hands. It struck the iron hook with a clean, metallic clang and sprang back to him, a perfect, obedient return. He caught it, a shock of pure relief coursing through him. Order.

The fourth shot was rage. It flew from him, worse than the first, a wild thing hurled into the darkness behind the backboard. “Damn it!” The curse exploded in the sacred silence. “All because of her. Why couldn’t she wait? A week. Just a week.” The shame was a hot flush. Borrowing from the wife's father! It was an ancient, humiliating transaction, a subtraction of his own stature. He was the provider who could not provide, the mathematician whose sums never added up to security.

He slowly walked to the errant planet. He began to bounce it again, a steady, penitent rhythm. And then, a deepening. A cloud, a soft, black felt, slid over the moon. The silver pool vanished. The world was extinguished. He was standing at the free-throw line in a pitch-black universe, holding a ball, aiming at nothing. He stared into the abyss where the hoop had to be, where the laws of physics insisted it still was. He saw nothing.

In that nothingness, his daughter’s face appeared. Not as she was now, but younger, confused over a simple equation, her brow furrowed not in concentration but in a kind of sorrow or shame. She doesn’t enjoy math. Why? What did I do wrong? And an answer, not his own, echoed in the vault of his skull: Nothing. Your child is not your child. You borrowed her from the future.” The words hung there. He did not question them. In the absolute dark, all statements were truths. He raised the ball, a gesture of faith. He did not aim; he simply released it toward the void, a surrender. It left his hands.

And then, a sound. A sound so soft, so perfect, it was almost not a sound at all but the ghost of one: a swift, clean swish. The net, sucking the ball through its hoop. A hole in the universe is accepting its offering. He stood frozen. Had he? It was impossible to know. The darkness revealed nothing. It could have been a trick of the air, an auditory hallucination born of desire. There was no proof. There would never be proof. He remembered his math classes where he was the master of truth. “Every theorem we mention in this class must be proven or must not be used at all…” A slow smile touched his lips in the blackness. “The wisdom of uncertainty,” he told the empty gym.

He waited. The cloud passed. The moon, that bright, nonchalant ball, returned. He found the ball and continued playing. "If darkness was the problem, inside the ball was even darker, so what?..." he whispered to himself, as if he needed to be convinced. For an hour or so, he played. Until the darkness ceased to be an opponent and became his only friend. Until his muscles ached with an honest fatigue. Until he realized that the basketball didn't have any intention of saving his marriage!  Until he missed Esra with a sharp, almost metaphysical yearning. Until he was profoundly, simply, crazily thirsty. Then he went home.

The Coats

The gate of the Sheldon Cooper High School was not made of iron, but a kind of sentient boundary. For Naci Zara, crossing its bleached-white gravel threshold each morning at 7:28 a.m. was a ritual of meticulous divestment. He did not simply walk through it; he was processed by it, a slow and deliberate shedding of selves, like a man carefully hanging his many coats on a series of invisible hooks in the air.

He left home as Naci, husband to Emel, father to a seven-year-old girl with sticky fingers, sparkly beads around her wrist, and a laugh like sudden, loud thunder. He had kissed them both, had smelled the warm, buttery scent of toast on Emel’s cheek, had felt the small, fierce weight of his daughter’s arms around his neck. This Naci, the man of the house, the man of a certain tender history, he left just there, at the gatepost. The ghost of his domestic self would wait patiently all day, a loyal dog, to be collected again at 4:45 p.m.

Parking his car under the usual banyan tree, a few steps onto the campus proper, on the asphalt path that cut through the militantly green lawn, he paused. Here, he shed his non-conformist political views. The carefully reasoned, quietly furious opinions he held on the morning’s news, the letters to the editor he composed in his mind during his commute—all of it was gently exhaled into the crisp air. The campus did not tolerate such messy, partisan colours. They bled into the perfect, abstract whiteness of the mathematical truth he was there to serve. They were variables for which this environment had no use. He felt them slip from his shoulders, a weightless, ideological cloak he would not need until he stepped back onto public pavement.

The main building swallowed him. The corridor was a long, polished throat of linoleum and lockers, smelling of lemon disinfectant and adolescent ennui. Here, walking with a measured pace that was neither hurried nor slow, he performed the most delicate operation. He unspooled his philosophical vexations. The dark, beautiful, and deeply controversial thoughts that visited him in the silent watches of the night—on the absurdity of consciousness, the elegant cruelty of natural selection, universe as a set of Markov chains, the godless, spinning rock they all clung to—these he carefully wound into a tight, invisible skein and placed on the window ledge near the fire extinguisher. They were too sharp, too potentially corrosive for the young minds he was approaching. A student might be cut on them. They were not part of the curriculum. His mind, now, was a clean, well-lit room, empty but for the furniture of instruction.

Finally, he reached the door to Room 217. On its pale green surface, a poster declared, “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics!” He placed his hand on the cold metal handle. This was the final relinquishment. Here, he left his personal morality. His private convictions on friendship, loyalty, betrayal, love—the complex, often irrational algebra of human connection—had no place inside. He was not here to be a friend, a confessor, or a moral guide. He was here to demonstrate proof. To be fair was to be consistent. To be kind was to be clear. Emotion was an irrational number in the clean, rational equation of the classroom.

He opened the door.

The man who entered was not Naci. He was a mechanism of exquisite specificity.

He placed his worn leather satchel on the desk with a soft thud that silenced the room’s low hum. His eyes, pale and cool behind his spectacles, scanned the rows of faces. They were not children, not individuals with names and histories that might snag on his attention; they were a cohort, a set of thirty units awaiting data input.

“Open your homework to page 274,” he said, his voice a calibrated instrument, devoid of tremolo or vibrato. “Problem number twelve. A common point of error.”

The next ten minutes were a flawless execution of code. Homework check. Three students were queried. Their answers were parsed, their errors traced back to a single misapplied axiom, a faulty transposition. He did not chide. He identified the bug in the logic. He was a diagnostician. p implies q does not always guarantee q implies p. A common mistake done by the high schoolers. Right Jessica, we talked about this a few times in the last two months. A flicker of a smile, a pre-programmed social cue to indicate approbation without warmth.

Fifteen minutes for new material. He turned to the board. “Today, we ascend to a higher plane of abstraction. We leave the comfortable, familiar line of real numbers and enter the plane. We welcome the complex number.”

His chalk, a brittle white wand, began to dance. It defined the imaginary unit, *i*, the square root of -1. “A necessary fiction,” he stated, “a logical phantom that makes a larger, more beautiful system possible.” Ohh, life, a ghost from the window ledge in the corridor whispered in the deep recesses of his machinery, isn’t it more complex? Don’t we all require our fictions, our irrational bits, to become whole? Neither real numbers are truly real, nor the imaginary numbers can be imagined. Everything is misnamed, the swamp of political correctness sucks him into an oblivious terrain of mud... He stared at the ceiling, the mischievous thoughts were instantly quarantined and deleted. They were not in the lesson plan.

He wrote the general form: a + bi. “The real part,” he said, tapping *a*. “The imaginary part,” tapping bi. “Together, they form a complex whole. A coordinate. A point.” He plotted them, these strange hybrids, on the complex plane he drew with two swift, perfect lines. His voice was a calm, steady drone, explaining conjugation, addition, multiplication. He was a guide in a strange new country, pointing out the sights without ever betraying a sense of their wonder.

The final twenty-five minutes. Group work. This was a subroutine designed to foster collaboration, a directive from the administration. There were 19 students in the class, a classy prime number, ten plus nine or ten square minus nine square. He thought “either one group of 19 students or 19 groups of one student.” He almost grinned but restrained his urges, not in the plan, not in the plan. He partitioned the class into four groups of four and one group of three. He distributed a worksheet. “You will solve these. One member from each group will present a solution to a different problem.”

The classroom erupted into a low chatter. Mr. Zara did not sit. He paced the perimeter, a silent orbital satellite. He monitored progress. He listened for conceptual errors. His interventions were minimal, precise. “Check your sign in step three.” “Remember the multiplicative property.” He was processing their efforts, running a silent diagnostic on their understanding.

One by one, they came to the board. A boy with nervous hands solved the first problem. A girl with a determined set to her jaw conquered the second. Mr. Zara watched, his head tilted slightly. He was not assessing them; he was assessing the output. The solutions were either correct or incorrect. He offered a “Precisely” or a “Re-examine your distribution” with utter impartiality. There was no pride, no frustration, only validation or error-correction.

The bell rang, a sharp, electric shock that severed the room’s focus.

“The problems on page 281, numbers one through twenty-three, odd only,” he announced to the rustling of closing books and zipping bags. “Show all work.”

They flowed past him, a river of youth and noise and complication, spilling back into the world of friendships and politics and moral dilemmas. He stood by his desk, the empty shell of Mr. Zara, the lesson plan completed, the objectives met.

Then four more classes repeated the same way, he entered the room, delivered his plan and started breathing after each session.

When the last student of the last class had vanished, he turned and left the room. The process began in reverse. At the classroom door, he collected the waiting shard of his morality. In the corridor, he retrieved the spool of his dark, beautiful philosophy from the window ledge. On the asphalt path, he drew a deep breath and took up the mantle of his political convictions, feeling their familiar weight and texture. And finally, at the gate, he stepped back into the skin of Naci, husband and father. The ghost by the gatepost merged with him, infusing his limbs with a sudden, human fatigue and a faint, anticipatory warmth.

He walked to his car, a man once more, the intricate and often contradictory sum of all his parts. The complex number made whole again, if only until tomorrow.

THE HAPPIEST TEACHER ON EARTH

Every morning, he stopped under the banyan tree before the school gates and drew the cloak around him. It had no sheen, no swirling theatrics; from a distance, it looked like a drab raincoat—something a mischievous uncle might wear to a funeral. But once it was on, he vanished, as neat as a coin dropped into a magician’s fist. He walked the corridors this way, brushing past bulletin boards with their half-detached staples, the wilted posters promising spirit and teamwork. He floated down the stairs like a rumor. In the cafeteria, he slipped unnoticed between the clatter of trays, the smell of oil too long reheated, and the official smiles of administrators rehearsing the day’s slogans. Pilfering a few pieces of pastry under his cloak, he entered the lift and stood in the corner like a dried mushroom—shrunk, inconspicuous, not to be felt by anyone.

It was not fear that drove him under the cloak, but practicality. If they saw him, they would remember. The summonses would follow: the subcommittee on extracurriculars, the emergency task force on vertical alignment, and strategic roundtables with a mission but no vision. All so solemn, all so hollow. Minutes were taken and distributed as though they were scripture - no one reads them, but everyone knows they are important! Meetings for the sake of meetings, to solve the problems that did not exist before the meeting, to justify the big words “collaboration”, “cooperation”, “measurable”, “success” … He had sat through enough to know that the most urgent conclusions usually collapsed under the weight of their own vagueness. So, he chose absence, a small vanishing act, his one rebellion against the screws and bolts of the education factory.

At the classroom door, he shed the cloak and folded it into his bag. The students looked up, their chatter thinning into a hush that was alive, not dutiful. Here he was visible again, and happily so. He asked a question; hands rose, some like arrows, others half-afraid, half-hopeful. A wrong answer gave him the chance to discuss persistence. A halting attempt let him speak of kindness, which he always slipped in as though it were another principle of mathematics. They leaned toward him, not in reverence—thank God—but in the bright impatience of desiring to know more.

Time inside the classroom was its own animal: brisk, tender, fully alert. He could pause for silence, let it grow, watch them searching. An equation was solved, and suddenly the room tilted toward understanding, the way sunlight shifts across a desk in midafternoon. He almost laughed sometimes at the thought of explaining this to a committee —what box would they tick for joy? for the glimmer of a moral compass? The very notion of turning it into a “learning outcome” seemed like a private joke he shared with himself. Here, though, nothing was wasted. Not a question, not a mistake, not even the nervous laugh of a student caught unprepared. He saw in them the one kind of record worth keeping: the steady, imperfect progress of minds and hearts.

And then the day was done. He slipped the cloak back over his shoulders before stepping into the corridor again. Invisible once more, he moved past the lockers, the stairwell, the cafeteria with its after-lunch silence. Yet something in him glowed so brightly, so freely, that he felt almost visible — joy radiating through the seams of the fabric. He walked out of the gates quietly, the hidden man who had, for a few hours, been seen exactly as he wished.

----

Liang Pi Yiyememek

Yiyemediğim liang pi. Fotoğraf internetten. 

 Öğlene doğru çıktım evden. Amacım yürüyerek parkın altındaki küçük lokantaya gidip liang pi yemekti. Sıcakta yenilecek en güzel yemeklerden birisidir; hafif acı, soğuk, süngerimsi tofu parçaları zahmetsizce akıp gidiyor boğazdan, salatalık, maydanoz ve kırmızı lahanalar ekşiliği arttırıyor. Sıcak demedim, nem demedim, neredeyse 3 km yürüdüm. Hedefe ulaşmamla en son bir ay önce ziyaret ettiğim lokantanın çehre değiştirdiğini fark etmem bir oldu. Tüm menü değişmiş, deniz ürünleri çorbası satan sıradan bir mekâna dönüşmüş. İçeriye bile girmedim o hayal kırıklığıyla. Sola sapıp yol boyunca yemek satan ufak lokantalara baktım. Kolay değil tabii etsiz bir yemek bulmak. Nihayet baozı satan bir yer buldum. İki tane tofulu-lahanalı baozı aldım. Sabah kahvaltısı da yemediğim için acıkmıştım. Baozılardan birisini hemen oracıkta indirdim mideme. Parka doğru yürüyordum ki Liang pi’ye benzeyen bir resim gördüm bir dükkânın önünde. Sordum, değilmiş. İçinde et var mı dedim, yok dedi. Tamam bana bir tane ver dedim. Dükkânın önündeki sadece anaokulu çocuklarının rahatlıkla oturabileceği büyüklükte bir sandalyeye ve sehpaya kuruldum. Kadın yemeğin adını söyledi ama aklımda kalmadı. Gerçi benim için fark etmez. Ben liang pi niyetine yedim. 10 Yuan’dı fiyatı. Rengi kırmızı değildi, içinde lahana yoktu ama onun dışında pek farklı değildi. Bir de su içtim yanında. Diğer baozıyı da yedim bu arada. Artık karnım doymuştu. Parka gittim, Tanpınar’ın mektuplarını okumaya devam ettim. “Fransızca ağzımda ikinci kelimede şişiyor, büyüyor. Suat İsmail’in kocaman eli, heceleri ağzımın içinde buluyor, ayırıyor. Sarhoş olunca daha rahat konuşuyorum.” demiş üstat Fransa’dan Adalet Cimcoz’a yazdığı bir mektupta. “Dünyada iki hasretim vardı. Biri Paris, diğeri güzel kadın. Burada ikisini de kaybettim.” diye de eklemiş daha sonra bizim müzmin huzursuz muharrirciğimiz.  Bir ara uykum geldi, yaşlı bir çiftin ayıplayan bakışlarına aldırmadan uzandım, hafiften sızdım suyun yanı başında. Uyanınca eve dönmeye karar verdim. Zaten belim ağrıyor, daha beter olmayayım durduk yerde. Dönüş yolunda tatil sonrası yapılan basmakalıp diyaloglardan birisini kurguladım kafamın içinde:

-          Nasıldı tatilin?

-          Istırap içinde!

-          Nasıl yani, bir yerlere gitmedin mi?

-          Yok, Shenzhen’da kaldım. Evin civarında uzun yürüyüşler ve balkonda uzun okumalar dışında bir şey yapmadım. Bir de klimalı odada öğleden sonra uykuları var.

-          Eeee, ne güzel işte! Neden ıstırap içinde diyorsun?

-          Yazamadığım için. Yazamadığım her gün, o günün boşa harcandığına dair bir suçluluk duygusunu getiriyor beraberinde. Ve bu duygu başka tüm zevklerin, eğlencelerin tadını kaçırıyor. Kendisine tevdi edilen asıl görevi yerine getiremeyip başkalarına yardım ederek onların teveccühünü kazanan memurun hissedeceği türden bir duygu. Kazılması gereken tünel dururken sahilde kumdan kaleler yapmak.   

-          Anlamadım, hem tevdi ne demek Alla’şkına?

-          …

-          Ben Osaka’daydım üç geceliğine. Çok güzeldi. Bambaşka bir dünya, sen de gitmelisin.

-          … 

Miskin Tanpınar

 Yine o boşluk, Tanpınar’ın mektuplarını okuyorum bu aralar. Hep kendinden şikâyetçi, kendisini hep miskin, başarısız ve değersiz görüyor. Benim bir sanatçıda olmazsa olmaz dediğim suçluluk, eksiklik ve borçluluk duyguları. Bazen kitabı bir kenara bırakıp “Ne kadar da birbirimize benziyoruz?” diyorum. Sonra da “Hadi oradan sünepe, haddini bil!” diye çemkiriyorum kendime. Tanpınar sefaletin dibini yaşamış, acıyı yaşamış, büyük değişimleri görmüş geçirmiş, içinde yaşadığı toplumla birlikte büyümüş, utanmış, yolunu yitirmiş; bunları kelimelere dökmüş zamanı gelince, kitaplar yazmış. Değerleri çok sonraları anlaşılsa da yazmış, yayımlamış, güzel dostluklar kurmuş, az çok bir itibar edinmiş edebiyat dünyasında. “Yemek olacağım yerde sofrada kaşık filan gibi bir şey oldum” sitemini ediyor bir de Ahmet Kutsi’ye yazdığı mektupların birinde. Ben o sofranın kurulduğu odaya bile alınmadım. Keyfim yerinde, altım kuru, karnım tok... Satıhta kaldım desem abartmış olurum, yüzünü Avrupa’ya dönmüş bir millete Asya’dan bağırdım. Sesimi duyuramadım.

Tanpınar'ın Mektupları, Zeynep Kerman, s 39